We’re just back from Paris to attend an event hosted by France Telecom’s Orange division, which provide wireless voice/data services in a variety of countries around the world. France Telecom is promoting and expanding their usage of HD Voice in both their fixed line and mobile entities.
Orange is using AMR-WB as the codec for the mobile handsets and G.722 for for the landlines. Europe uses the GSM radio technology and to conserve bandwidth, voice is today encoded using the GSM codec at a bit rate of typically 13.2 kbps! We’ve all experienced the general poor quality of mobile calls and it would be easy to blame the relatively low transmission speed as the culprit.
AMR-WB (the WB stands for wide band) provide an HD Audio experience and uses only 12.65 kbps! Basically the same as the existing GSM Codec. AMR-WB is newer and fairly sophisticated and older mobile handsets lacked the horsepower to encode and decode voice calls using this codec. Clearly that’s not a concern today. Hence, Orange is rapidly moving forward after a brief trial period.
What did they learn? In surveying their customers, Orange found …
- Customer’s immediately recognized the better quality experience,
- Talked longer on the phone
- Easier to understand and be understood
- Less stressful than a normal phone call
More importantly, Orange is NOT charging more for HD Audio on mobile, the mobile handsets are the same price as normal and for the Orange network, there’s no increase in bandwidth consumption. It’s a win-win for all!
TurboBridge supports AMR-WB as a beta offering and we’re working with mobile operators to enable them to provide a direct connection to us. As you know, TurboBridge’s main focus is on offering you a better quality audio experience at a better price. We continue to develop our technology, so look to hear more on this topic as the year continues. We’re exciting about the prospects for HD Audio on mobile handsets.